Marry Me Page 17

  “I would have.”

  She slapped his back lightly in reprimand. “And you’re distracting me, wandering off the subject again.”

  “You’re not going to let me off the hook, are you?” He chuckled, wondering at the ease of it.

  “Yes I would.” Her hands stilled. She tilted her head back. “I would. If you really want me to.”

  “Too late now.” Gently he pushed her head back where it belonged. He couldn’t look at her and get through it all. He knew that much. He’d see the sympathy, the understanding in her eyes, and he’d be lost. And suddenly it seemed important to say it all at least once. “You’re stuck.”

  Blessedly, sweetly, her hands took up their warm caress again. He found himself speaking in rhythm with them, as if they drew the words from him with each circle they made. “My mother had to find work then. There wasn’t much. She’d no experience, no skills. Just cleaning, and oh, she could do that!” He smiled at the memory. “Still does, come to think of it. Can make a floor shine like it was made out of diamonds.”

  “She’s still alive?”

  “Oh yeah. Still scrubbing floors. Says she’s afraid she’ll stiffen up like an old lady if she stops, so she keeps at it. She could run me into the ground any day.” And suddenly he missed her, with her wiry body that barely came up to his chest but that could still make him quake in his boots. He’d write her tomorrow, he promised himself. “So she went to work for the Bateses.”

  “Rich?”

  “Oh yeah. That house I struggled so much to build wouldn’t be fit for his dog.” He expected that admission to bite; he’d never been able to look at his claim shack without comparing it to the house in which Julia had been raised. But he’d built a house with his own hands that had stood up to two winters on the plains. It was more than most he knew in Chicago could claim.

  “I know the kind,” she said dryly.

  “Oh?”

  “Later,” she promised, and he made a mental note to ask. Another similarity, it seemed. It no longer surprised him.

  “I was too young to be left alone all the time, and the housekeeper was kind. She let Mother smuggle me in now and then. Even let me hang around the kitchen and ’approve’ the desserts.” He hadn’t realized he still held good memories of Bates House. They’d been submerged for years, sunk beneath the weight of the darker ones. It felt good to take them out again to glitter and shine, the glowing pieces of a childhood that had been mostly bright. “They had a library. A huge room, with big arched windows that welcomed the sun. I’d never seen anything like it, and there was hardly ever anyone there. It became my sanctuary.”

  “The books,” she murmured. He felt her mouth move against him, the press and brush of her lips against his cloth-covered chest, and had to struggle to hang on to a thought.

  “Huh?”

  “All those books. That you left in the shack. I wondered about them. About the kind of person who’d go to so much trouble to lug them out here and take such good care of them. And who’d have such a wide range of material.”

  “Impressed you, did I?”

  “You most certainly did.” He laid his cheek on the top of her head. He’d held her before, remembered her scent. But usually it had been for Kate’s benefit and he’d weighed each move for its best effect. This he did for himself. Because he liked the feel of her, and for no other reason. Because it made him feel hopeful and warm and yes, maybe even a bit happy.

  “I was…ten, I think. I rarely saw any of the family—the Bateses, that is. I’d been trained well to stay out of the way. But I was curious. Why wouldn’t I be? I was in the library reading Moby Dick when Mr. Bates strolled in. He was never there during the day. Still don’t know why he was then, but it was too late to run.”

  “Mr. Bates?” she asked.

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “Oh. I thought you were going to tell me about your wife.”

  “I’m getting there,” he told her. “Story too slow for you? Want me to hurry up so you don’t get bored?” he asked.

  “Don’t you dare. It’s taken me long enough to get even a hint from you. I want to hear every single detail.”

  “You wondered about me?”

  Her hair smelled like sunshine in a garden. The scent had haunted him for days, a light drift here and there just out of his reach that he hadn’t been able to get ahold of.

  “Yes,” she admitted. “I wondered. A lot.”

  “I’m flattered.”

  “You shouldn’t be. I’m a curious sort, too.”

  “Never woulda guessed.” Curious, and vibrant, and kind. And a lot of other things, he’d wager. Things he was now sorry he’d never have the time to find out about her. “Anyway, I stood there quaking in my shoes, clutching that book before me like I thought it might shield me. I figured I was out on my ass for good, and my mother, too.”

  “But you weren’t.”

  “Nope. He took one look at the book, rocked back on his heels, and opined that I might as well stop pretending, there was no chance that a poor rough urchin like me could be reading such a tome.”

  “He didn’t!” she said, indignant on his behalf.

  “Oh, he did. He had opinions, had Mr. Bates. I took offense. Stupid; I should have slunk out the first chance I got. Mom needed the job, and I sure didn’t need Mr. Bates on my tail. But instead I flipped open the book and started reading the first paragraph my eyes fell on. Fast as I could, spewing out the words before he could stop me, so I could prove that I knew how. That I wasn’t just some dumb punk kid looking at the pictures.”

  “If you’d tried that on Dr. Goodale, you’d have made it to word two.”

  “Well, I made it to page three before he stopped me. Then he grabbed a copy of Ragged Dick, opened it to the middle, and shoved it at me. I read—was too afraid not to. He took a liking to me, I guess. I never was sure why.”

  Emily wondered how many questions she dared ask, how many pieces of the puzzle she’d discover tonight. The words that spilled out of him told her one thing. His body told her just as much; tenderness, strength, emotion carefully contained, all the more powerful for it.

  “I didn’t see him all that much. Once every few months he’d call me in and have me tell him what I was learning. He’d fire questions at me, always at least a couple I couldn’t answer, and I’d better have it right by the next time or…well, he never told me what would happen ‘or.’”

  “You always had the answer by the next time?”

  “Oh yes. I’d have been terrified not to. And ashamed.”

  He enveloped her. His arms linked around her back, his cheek resting on the top of her head, his voice pouring over her and sinking in deep. She’d never get the sound of it out again, not completely. From now on some part of her would always hold on to the memory of him giving her something she knew he’d given no one else.

  “When I got old enough, he paid for my tuition.”

  “That was very kind of him.”

  “I thought so. Oh hell, I still think so, even though now I realize he educated me because he figured I’d be of use to him someday. It was still an opportunity I’d have never had otherwise.”

  He paused. It got harder now. Darker. And full of his own mistakes, ones that he could explain all he wanted but would still make him look like the worst kind of cad. And he didn’t want her to think that of him. He shouldn’t care, there was no reason to care, but there it was. He did.

  “He had a daughter.”

  “Ah,” she said lightly. “There she is at last. I was wondering if you were ever going to get to her.”

  “Julia. She was two years younger than me and for a long time I was only vaguely aware that she existed. I lived for those times I had Mr. Bates’s full attention and really wasn’t all that interested in remembering that she’d far more claim on him than I.”

  Emily tried to identify how his voice had changed. Deeper, perhaps. A barely there tremor beneath the words. An almost imperceptible hint that betr
ayed the anguish beneath the smooth recitation.

  Unthinkingly, she turned her head and pressed a kiss on his chest. Hard, wide-mouthed, so shockingly blatant that had she stopped to consider she never would have done it. Hadn’t realized such a thing would ever occur to her.

  He went rigid. “Lord.” Beneath her mouth, she felt his heartbeat pick up speed. “If you’ll do that every time I make a confession, we can stand here all night and I can tell you about every cookie I stole and every swearword I spewed in my entire childhood.”

  His hand came up, fisted in her hair, holding her there. And then slowly he loosened his grip, by increments, and ran his hand through the full length of her hair, again and again, and she was glad she’d not pinned it all away today.

  She turned her head again, resting her cheek against him. Darkness had dropped, a blue velvet curtain over the small slice of sky she could see above the lift and spread of the land. Even as she watched, one star winked on, as if the heavens had lit the eve’s first candle.

  “Tell me more.”

  “She grew up. So did I. And when I was eighteen years old—I’d just started at the university, and I was so full of it, and myself—I came out of Mr. Bates’s study, took a small detour to the garden to enjoy the sun, and there she was. I know it sounds silly, and young, and…false, but I just saw her, and that was it for me.”

  “It doesn’t sound silly. Not to me.” It sounded enviable. And that was silliness indeed to wish that Jake Sullivan might have taken one look at her and fallen instantly in love.

  “Well, it did to me. I told myself it was just…well, why wouldn’t she draw me? She was everything I wasn’t. She belonged there, and I didn’t. But I wanted to. And I wanted her.”

  “And she felt the same way?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t even speak to her that day. I knew I couldn’t get my mouth to work.”

  “She must have been lovely.”

  “Oh yes.” And he wished, irrationally, that Emily hadn’t said that so easily. That there’d been a trace of jealousy in her voice, to hear him praise another woman. He’d no idea his pride required such plumping. “Ethereal as a fairy, as if she wasn’t of this earth. But that wasn’t what drew me the most. It was that she looked at me like—well, I knew I could conquer the world. That she believed I could conquer the world. Her father was about challenge, and making me prove that I could make a place in his world. She never saw that there was a difference between us.”

  “She loved you right away?”

  “Oh, we were friends. Or so we pretended. We talked. Met in secret, walked in the gardens, left little notes we knew would make the other laugh. We pretended it would be enough. But I always knew. I think she did, too.”

  His throat closed. He could stop right now. Emily wouldn’t push. He’d told her enough.

  But it would be unfair to quit now. Unfair to Emily to let her view him as a tragic figure, one who deserved her sympathy.

  “I couldn’t leave it at that. It wasn’t enough for me. I couldn’t not—oh, hell, Em. She was nineteen years old, sheltered for every one of them, and she cried when she told me there would be a baby.”

  Emily realized he couldn’t be more than four years older than she. But he’d already lived so much more than she had. She’d seen people die, had even held the hands of a few as they slipped away. But she’d never loved with her whole heart and lost. Even her parents—she’d been too young to remember her mother, and her father had never been more than a vague, shadowy figure, patting her on the head before disappearing for days at a time. It seemed a canyon between them, him on one side, her on the other, separated by this vast and terrible experience. And yet she felt closer to him than anyone. She couldn’t imagine the man he’d been before; this experience had transformed him into the grave and solitary man she knew.

  “I married her the instant I could arrange it. How could I not? She was carrying my child. I figured it would be hard. But we loved each other, and I was willing to give everything I had to take care of her and our baby. Wanted to do it. It never occurred to me it wouldn’t be enough.”

  “Don’t say that.” She couldn’t bear that he would think his best inadequate. And she had no doubt at all he’d done his best.

  He fell silent. Debating whether to insist upon his guilt, she’d wager. “Go on,” she urged him.

  “I had to leave school, of course. Mr. Bates certainly wasn’t going to continue to pay my tuition after what I’d done. Not that it mattered,” he added quickly, unwilling to sound disloyal. “Northwestern only enrolls single students.”

  “But—” Why? she wondered. Why wouldn’t he have expected support from his new father-in-law, his mentor? The sound of his heartbeat filled her head, resonated with her own. “He didn’t approve?”

  “Good God, Emily, of course he didn’t approve!” And she knew that however harshly his father-in-law had judged him, Jake judged himself more severely. “I seduced his daughter.”

  “And you loved his daughter. You married his daughter.”

  He chose not to debate the point. “I had a family to support. I wanted to give them a home, a place of their own.”

  “So you came here.”

  “So I brought her here.” She felt his chin move gently across the top of her head, as if he were taking in the view. Perhaps remembering what they’d seen when they arrived.

  “She was…oh, I don’t know why I ever thought it might suit us! She was too gentle for this place. The pregnancy was hard. Finally I swallowed my pride, took her home, and begged her parents to let her stay. They finally did, even though her father told her the day we left that if she went out the door with me she could never come back.” He paused. Swallowed hard. “It was too late.”

  “Jake.” Leaning back into his embrace, so she could judge the effect of her words, she chose them carefully. “I do have some experience here. To be precise, I’ve been present at the birth of thirty-seven babies.”

  She saw the shift of muscle in his jaw as his teeth clamped together. “Thirty-seven? You remember every one?”

  “Every single one. You don’t forget miracles, not even after a thousand, if you’ve been privileged to witness them.”

  A shudder ran through him.

  “Most of the births have been perfect. A few have…not. Jake, if there’s one thing you absolutely must understand, it’s that if you’d never taken her one foot from her house it might not have changed anything. You brought her back to Chicago before the birth, yes?”

  “I…what else could I do? I couldn’t let her deliver out here alone. The nearest doctor’s thirty miles away and he’s drunk more often than sober.”

  “Bringing her home sooner, or not taking her here at all—it likely made no difference.”

  God, but he wanted to believe her. But she hadn’t been there. She didn’t know. “You didn’t see how much it changed her. From the moment we came here. How hard it was on her, how much of her strength it sapped. I should have known. Should have realized it sooner.”

  “The hardest thing about medicine for me has always been the ‘ifs.’ You never know what might have happened had you done this differently, made another choice. Because there’s no chance to try again, no opportunity to correct your mistakes. And you never even know if they were mistakes. Sometimes you do the absolutely right thing and bad things still happen. It could have been simple coincidence that she became ill when you arrived here.”

  Perhaps she was right. It didn’t change his ultimate culpability. “Be that as it may, it still remains that the child was mine.”

  “Oh? And you forced her?”

  He shoved her away. “Of course not!”

  “Jake.” She’d pushed too hard, Emily thought in regret. She’d wanted so badly to help him forgive himself that she’d only made things worse. He stood apart from her now, his hands on his hips, expression fierce and haunted as he stared into the last, dying flame of the sunset. “Jake.” For an instant, for the first ti
me since she’d awoken to a stranger beside her bed, she feared him. Still, she’d pressed the issue, and so she must take the risk. Her body painfully tensed, she laid her hand upon his arm, and let out a rushing breath of relief when he allowed it to stay. “I know that. And so did you. It does no one good for you to accept more than your share. And I doubt Julia would want it any more than I do.”

  He didn’t answer. The wind mourned through the grass. Somewhere high, a hawk wheeling against the darkening sky called to an absent mate. But at last he placed his hand over hers where it rested on his forearm, then linked his fingers with hers.

  It wasn’t agreement. Not even a maybe. But it wasn’t a no, and hope lifted her heart.

  “Two days old. I haven’t seen her since she was two days old. Jesus, she was so small. Hair like peach fuzz. She didn’t even open her eyes to look at me.” His voice broke. “Em, I don’t even know what color her eyes are.”

  “But—but…your daughter?”

  “Yeah. We named her Jenny. I don’t even know if they still call her that.”

  “But I just assumed—” She’d assumed the baby had died with her mother. An unbearable tragedy, all too dreadfully common. “Your daughter’s alive?”

  “I…” His voice trailed off, a wafting of pain. “I assume she is. Christ, Em, I didn’t even think of that.” His fingers crushed hers painfully. So be it; if the bones broke, well, they’d heal. “I just…she’d be nearly fourteen months old by now. They’d tell me if she’d died, wouldn’t they?”

  “You’d know.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “Yes,” she said, and hoped there was enough conviction in her voice. “You’d know.”

  “God!” He yanked her back to him, bringing her hard up against his chest, the same position he’d shoved her from a few moments before. But this time it wasn’t she who held him, and it wasn’t gentle. He clutched her to him, hanging on with the desperation of a man clinging to his last hope.